Professor Xin-Hui XING, MOE Key Lab of Industrial Biocatalysis, Department of Chemical Engineering, and Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; Biopharmaceutical and Health Engineering Division, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Shenzhen, China

Enabling High Throughput Breeding Technologies for Green Biomanufacturing

Development of rapid and powerful mutagenesis and high throughput technologies including functional genomics and adaptive evolution tools is of importance for engineering microbiology by discovery of biological dark matters and genome-phenotype association. ARTP (atmospheric and room temperature plasma) mutagenesis system developed by our group can directly cause complex genome mutation including chain break and bases mutation via a unique mechanism. Mechanistic study and various practical applications in cell breeding demonstrated that ARTP mutagenesis is a powerful tool. To fully exploit the microbial genome resources, we established a novel method capable of investigating the cellular consequences of repressing individual transcripts based on the CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) pooled screening in bacteria. We further developed a microdroplet-based microbial culture (MMC) system which can be operated automatically with high throughput culture on microchips, good repeatability, online detection of growth states, reprogrammable software, automatic addition of gradient chemical factors. These tools can greatly contribute to rapid development of microbial cell factory for green biomanufacturing.

Biography
Prof. Xin-Hui XING received his B.S. from South China University of Technology in 1985, and Ph.D. from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1992. He had been Assistant Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1992 to 1998, and Associate Professor at Yokohama National University from 1998 to2001. He was selected as a full professor by the 100-Telent Scholar Program of Tsinghua University in 2000 and joined Department of Chemical Engineering since then. He has served as the director of Institute of Biochemical Engineering from 2002, and the deputy director of Key Laboratory of Industrial Biocatalysis, Ministry of Education of China from 2011. He had been the vice department chairman from 2009 to 2018. His research field covers biobreeding technology and instrumentation, high throughput technology, engineering biology, enzyme engineering, environmental biotechnology and bioenergy. He serves as the associate editor of Biochemical Engineering Journal, and editorial board of several domestic and international journals.

Host: Associate Professor Mingdong Dong, Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center